London-based hair color brand Bleach London, known for its at-home vegan hair color kits and salons, is looking to make its mark on the U.S. following a successful dozen years across the pond. Its viral TikTok success is helping boost its follower growth on average by 2.7% month-over-month—mostly by attracting new American fans.
Its first U.S. campaign nabbed 2.8 million views on the app. 18.7 million TikTok users watched a hair-cutting demonstration on the brand’s page. Thus far, the brand has accrued 272.5K followers and 5.8 million likes on TikTok.
Co-founder Alex Brownsell says “edu-tainment” has become a core tenant of its social media strategy in order to continue gaining traction in the US. She believes its mix of informative but entertaining content is setting the brand apart from others playing in the hair space.
“A lot of people don’t know much in terms of hair and education—even about their own hair and what processes they’ve been going through with it. A big mission of ours too is to take the bullshit out for the consumer and actually tell them what they’re using and not fluff it up to confuse them. And that’s what we’ve done in the UK and hopefully, we’ll do it here[the US].” explains Brownsell.
While Bleach London’s Instagram does a great job of showing the product’s end results, TikTok shines when it comes to revealing the intricacies of the hair care and coloring process. She continues, “There’s a lot of creators who talk about science or product in a really interesting way that’s not draining to watch. One of our main barriers is that people think that bleach breaks your hair off. So through our entertainment, we are trying to show how to use the product in the right way or how to get things out of products in a way that doesn’t damage hair.” Currently, Bleach London has 100 million organic views on TikTok.
Brownsell made the jump to TikTok when she began noticing Bleach London’s Instagram page better served as a sales driver for its 346K followers, rather than as a creative content platform. “I wasn’t finding it as fun as I had in the early days and TikTok was very young and I’d seen some kids using it, people talking about it, but nobody knew what it was. And I was like, this could be a really fun place for Bleach to exist,” she recalls.
Brownsell wasn’t actively looking to capture American followers with TikTok at the time but the account did just that. She says ASMR video content, in particular, struck a chord with American viewers. “We found that that kind of content, which no hair brand was even thinking about [at the time], was doing really well for us.”
Tracking views, likes and follower growth is important, but the number of saves is the key leading indicator when Brownsell is determining whether a video was successful. “If people are saving it, it means that they’re then taking it away to re-watch it. Or when they’re selecting their product with us or with anyone else, they’re looking back on that content and referencing it and taking away the information,” she explains.
Follower growth seems to be less linear on TikTok as compared to Instagram warns Brownsell and she says brands should be prepared for some trial and error when it comes to creating content that pops. “On Instagram, you could put it [follower growth] on a graph, whereas on TikTok it might stay the same for months on end and then with one post suddenly you can gain 5%,10% more followers in a day,” she says. “Everybody likes to grow in reach and following, but actually even having lots of followers doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got a great reach on TikTok.”
After doing hair from her home, Brownsell first founded Bleach Salon in 2010 as a pop-up space in a nail salon with just two chairs. She hunted for rising creators on Tumblr and invited them in for free treatments in order to boost brand awareness. “We grew a lot in the UK and we’re quite a big, the biggest probably indie hair brand in the UK, definitely in terms of hair color, we’re quite well known.” Bleach London now operates three salon locations in the UK and one in LA.
According to investor Gresham House Ventures, a bleach kit by the brand was sold every 45 seconds during the first four weeks of the initial 2020 COVID lockdown.
Following her success in the UK, Brownsell began putting plans in place to expand to the U.S. Bleach London hosted a popup salon in 2012 at Milk Studios during New York Fashion Week. But, it took 8 more years to be in a strong enough position financially and to establish the right connections for a permanent US space to make sense.
Brownsell felt strongly that having a flagship salon up and running before the products were available in retail stateside was key. “It’s the heart of what we do… It’s always in the salon. The US is a much different market from the UK. We’re in LA and people know us, but we’ve got so much to do still— TikTok is helping, which is good.” Bleach Salon opened in West Hollywood in 2021. Its products, priced from $8-$15, launched in CVS, Kroger and Walmart in 2022.
At 35 Brownsell has been in the business for 23 years. Her mom was a hairdresser in a small town in the Midlands and at 16 she moved to London to train as a hairdresser officially. By 20 she was a working hairdresser dabbling in editorial work; at 22 she opened her first brick-and-mortar Bleach London concept.
The end goal is for Bleach London to become the go-to hair color brand for home use.
“We have salons that have a high price point where we have the best hairdressers and colorists in the world, creating amazing hair color transformations. Lots of our clients are celebrities, a lot of them are people with influence but obviously, there’s no accessibility there,” Brownsell explains. “Having the product range means that we can touch more people who want to experiment and do hair color at home and do hair color in a fun cool way, and not have to pay the prices of expensive salons.”
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